Range Report 6APR2025: Trapdoor Gallery Cartridges and .45-70-500

 Today I shot the course of fire with gallery cartirdges recommended by Stanhope Blunt in his 1889 Firing Regulations for the U.S. Army.  In addition, I shot three tables of fire with historically correct recreations of the M-1881 .45-70-500 cartridge used in the last iteration of the Springfield Trapdoor Rifle.

Gallery cartridge design after Pitman's Notes vol. 3 p. 98.

Gallery Shooting
Gallery cartridges are made by adding 7 grains of rifle powder (in this case, Swiss 2F) under a .454 round ball weighing 141 grains that had been coated in bullet grease.  As the drawing above shows, the bullet is pressed down onto the powder.  In my case, I put a card under the ball to prevent the grease from contaminating the powder during storage (you can see where some of the cards hit the target in the photo below).

In Blunt's book, after soldiers had gone through musketry instruction they would be taken to a gallery range where they would get practice using their sight settings while shooting at short range (17 yards).  They would fire three sets of five shots at a target like the one below.  The first five were shot standing offhand using the 200-yard sight setting (the lowest on the 1884 et seq. rifles) aiming at the bull using a 6:00 hold; then they would fire five more kneeling or sitting using the 300-yard setting and aiming 6 in. below the bull; and 5 more prone using the 500-yard setting while aiming at a spot 10.25 in. below the bull. The targets should be 7 in. tall and 6 in. wide, with a bull of one inch surrounded by rings at 3 and 5 inches around it.  Scoring was 5 points for a bullseye; 4 points for a center; 3 points for an inner; and 2 points for an outer (which is anywhere in the black rectangle of the target).

Gallery target setup.

I recreated this exercise in full today as exactly as I could as shown in the photo below.  Note that all fifteen rounds pretty much made one giant hole, making scoring almost impossible, but there are no bullseyes and all the hits are either in the center or inner.  What look like hits below it were made by the cards hitting the paper.

Table One: Gallery fire.

Closeup of the Gallery target.

I think it is safe to say that this is a far better than "passing" score (although Blunt does not give a minimum), and that my recreation of the gallery cartirdges worked very well.

.45-70-500 Practice
After shooting the Gallery evolution, I next turned to shooting M-1881 cartridges.  These are exact reproductions of the last military version used with the Springfield Trapdoor Rifle.  They have .45-caliber 500-grain flat-based, round-nosed bullets over 70 grains of rifle powder (Swiss 2F in my case).  I have achieved a muzzle velocity with these bullets that is within 1/100th of a percent of the originals as recorded by the Ordnance Department reports of the period.  To see how I make them, go HERE.

My recreation of the M-1881 cartridge.

For scoring, I used the String Test system commonly used in the 19th century.  Regular readers of this blog will be sick of this by now, but for anyone who isn't, you can learn more about this system HERE.

Table Two
In Table Two, I shot 10 rounds at 50 yards from a rest.  Note the blue diamond below the black bullseye--this was my aiming point.  As the photo below makes clear, most of the rounds went through the same hole, indicating marvelous precision in this excellent rifle.

Table Two.

Closeup of Table Two; note that most of the bullets went through the same hole.

10 rounds
String: 24.5 in.
String Test: 2.4 in./round

Table Three
In Table Three, I shot at 100 yards, but the target had no mark on it to use in aiming off, which resulted in "stringing" of the rounds up and down the target due to the fact that I had to aim at a blank spot below the bull by estimation, and had no mark to allow me to do so precisely.  I shot this table from a sitting unsupported position, so obviously accuracy suffered from my shaking hands and bad eyesight.

Table Three.

9 rounds (one would not feed)
String: 33.0 in.
String Test: 3.7 in./round.

Table Four
In Table Four I shot 15 rounds at my recreation of a British Snider 3rd-class target (I haven't printed up any of the ones Blunt depicted yet) which helped somewhat with aiming off.  This was also shot at 100 yards from a seated unsupported position.  I was very pleased with this table of fire as getting a String Test below 3 inches at 100 yards is something I have not achieved before with any black-powder rifle.

Table Four.

15 rounds
String: 41 in.
String Test: 2.7 in./round